Re: Re(2): silence, not absence

From: Paul Dillon (dillonph@northcoast.com)
Date: Thu Dec 02 1999 - 00:04:31 PST


Diane,

I was reading your post with interest having just read the very personal
approach that Walkerdine takes in "Daddy's Girl" to the question of class
consciousness. You wrote, "am re-reading henri bergson's "creative
evolution" as a way to figure virginia woolf's fiction,and am struck by the
radical concepts of early 20th century departures,
and how these have been absorbed by dominant conceptions of legitimacy."

This intrigued me because of the importance of bergson's insistence on
"lived time", the duree. Throughout the discussion on temporality going on
in November I kept thinking that the conception of time being proposed was
something like the advanced Ptolemaic system for the motion of the planets.
Still geocentric but with lots of epicycles to account for planets in
retrograde, etc. Bergson proposed such a radically different perspective
on time, one that we find phenomenologically elaborated in Schutz's
description of social time as composed of ancestors, contemporaries, and
descendants. Bergson definitely saw being as process, as time; not as
stasis and space which seems to be the orthodox view -- doesn't relativity
simply convert time into a kind of space? Heterochrony just an elaborate
topology.

Do you think Bergson's ideas were among those "absorbed by dominant
conceptions of legitimacy?" I'd be interested to know how. I always
thought he was one of the major figures in the lineage of qualitative
theory -- a voice for the deemphasis of linearity and quantification.
Definitely not a household word among the factor analysis/canonical taxonomy
orthodoxy.

For the last 1/2 year I've lurked/marginally participated on a list serv
dedicated to Research on Non-Profits and Volunteer Associations. Those
folks are very much into qualitative research -- perhaps one also finds a
much greater percentage of women in executive/decision making positions, I
don't know. Perhaps it's because they are not for profit organizations (a
less essential, more activity theoretic approach).

I also was intrigued by your statement that, "silence - as - power strikes
me as a masculine privilege that women inadvertently co-opt as modes of
self-protection. it is not safe to say many things, and safe to say very
little" .

Are you saying that when men are silent this connotes or is an exercise of
power but not so for women for whom it is a mode of self-protection? Do
you think that it is only women who keep silent out of fear of the negative
consequences of "telling it like it is"?

Orwell's Winston Smith writing in his secret journal, "I write this for the
future . . ."

Paul H. Dillon



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 11 2000 - 14:04:05 PST